Introduction to Conversations with Creators

We are excited to share our online home, the space where your ideas and images will be curated, by bringing you the interviews that will complement our poetry and prose. Consider these entry points, the bridge between direct interaction with an artist and the solitude of confronting texts alone, inviting us to dive into the wreck, in the metaphor of the groundbreaking poet Adrienne Rich who left us last year. Her work invites us to climb deep into spaces where we have been excluded, and to carve our stories into the walls that had delineated the boundaries of our existence. She asks us to be documentarians, to be both gentle and ferocious.

Because writing is about communication, each issue will begin with discussions between artists – Hypothetical: A Review of Everything After‘s editorial team and other interviewers in conversation with a creator who offers insight into contemporary literature, theater, music, or visual art. These dialogues focus on the creator’s recent project; how its content relates to our creed; its relevance to the world beyond the page, stage or screen; the intersection of the creator with cultures and places; and the process of producing in his or her genre or medium.

We proudly present you with Issue One’s conversations, featuring two debut novelists and an actress who adapted and performed a one-woman interpretation of Wallace Shawn’s “The Fever.” In a reflection of our global scope, Chandler Klang Smith comes from the heartland of the United States, Simona Maicanescu lived through Romania’s dictatorship and now resides in France, and Zachary Karabashliev writes in San Diego in a prose style reflecting the shifting winds of his Bulgarian childhood.

We hope you dive into the minds of these interlocutors and creators to fuel your own passions and craft – or merely to be moved to think about the world in ways you had not previously imagined.

Stay tuned in the coming days and weeks as Issue One builds with poetry and prose from around the world. We have gathered together texts to speak to you as creations with lives of their own, born when your response as reader fuses with the author’s words. Until then, may this first of Issue One’s three parts whet your appetite for the transforming, energizing impact of untold stories.

We are eager to engage with readers, form community and present you with original literature by some of the most talented contemporary writers on the planet we all share. We look forward to your feedback, submissions and readership.